Friday, July 13, 2012

I've spent this week in beautiful Knoxville conducting community input groups for The MUSE, an emerging museum here. Even though we weren't soliciting specific exhibit ideas at this stage, people couldn't help share their excitement for exhibit areas they had seen at other museums around the country.

Inevitably (perhaps) when the discussion turned to young children, and children's museums, the old exhibit warhorse of the kid-sized grocery store reared its head. So I thought now would be a good time to re-post the reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits so, in a screed entitled:

"NOT Another Grocery Store Exhibit!"

At the end of a recent conference presentation, I threw a chunk or rhetorical "red meat" to
the crowd by saying that I'd be quite happy if I never saw another
kid-sized grocery store exhibit in a children's museum ever again.
Given the raised eyebrows and open-mouthed stares from many in the
audience I thought I'd share the top five reasons why I dislike grocery
store exhibits:

2) Grocery store exhibits are unfair to museum floor staff and volunteers.These
galleries might more accurately be called "entropy exhibits" since the
main activity for young visitors seems to be to madly rush about pulling
every facsimile grocery store item off the shelves, shoving them into
the miniature shopping carts or onto the phony checkout conveyor and
then leaving. The poor floor staff and volunteers assigned to this area
then, Sisyphus-like,engage in resorting the mess left behind again and again as new visitors enter the mini store.

3) Grocery store exhibits are just creatively lazy.When I visit a museum with one of these areas, I instinctively think, "well, they must have run out of good
exhibit ideas." Despite all the high-minded rationalizations --- "the
kids are learning about food groups" or "our grocery store shows
visitors where milk and tomatoes actually come from..." I say if that
was really what you wanted to get visitors thinking about, there are
only about a dozen more entertaining and interesting ways to address
those particular topics in an exhibition format than riding the tired
mini grocery store warhorse once again. (Although if food groups or
farm to store topics were high on your exhibit"wish list" to begin with,
I'm not sure I'd want to visit with my kids in the first place.)

4) Grocery store exhibits send at least as many unintended messages as intended messages.I'd
really rather not send the message that it's alright to tear up an
exhibit area and make a mess and then leave it to other people to clean
up, or that shopping for food is some sort of wacky leisure activity
instead of a necessity. If we really thought carefully about the ideas
that kids are leaving grocery store exhibits with instead of blithely,
and automatically, assuming that frenetic activity in an exhibition area
equals "fun" or "learning" we might try out some different ideas.

5) Grocery store exhibits are the worst sort of craven fundraising ploys.One
of the most common reasons I hear directors defend their choice of a
kid-sized grocery store exhibit is "We can easily get a sponsor for
this." Believe me, after 27 years in the museum business, I understand
the need to fundraise, but are you trying to create unique, amazing
exhibit spaces, or just sell chunks of museum real estate?

Unfortunately
most museum "sacred cows" come from just the sort of "well this is the
way we've always done things" or "I've heard it works amazingly well at
Museum X" sort of thinking.

What do you think? Do you have some
of your own favorite museum "sacred cows" you'd like to throw on the
fire? Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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